Case Study: MDRC achieves streamlined budgeting and clear resource visibility with KCI Computing's CONTROL

Controlling Complexity with Confidence

MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization managing roughly 70 concurrent projects with complex, multi-source funding and project-specific reporting rules, struggled with budgeting and resource transparency using Excel and then Cognos Planning. Those tools caused slow performance, versioning problems and limited publishable reporting, so MDRC selected KCI Computing’s CONTROL to replace spreadsheets and legacy planning software.

KCI Computing implemented CONTROL in a six-month, phased rollout for project budgeting, corporate consolidation and resource planning, delivering web-accessible, task-level budget-to-actual reports updated monthly from the accounting system. The solution eliminated versioning issues, restored fast performance and enabled real-time resource visibility for bidding and hiring decisions, strengthened accountability via dashboards and multi-dimensional analytics, and improved MDRC’s ability to plan and monitor costs across projects.

MDRC

Wallace D’Souza

Assistant Director of Budgeting and Project Financial Services